If reading the page doesn't make you giddy, this might not be for you. No shame in that. But this is a whole new playground for some of us and some stuff might come out of this in the future that you might like!

OMG am I finally going to get my acclaimed VLC to run on my Archos!!!? Ohh man I am fooling around with this when I get home from work! Then I just have to get alien up and running on the distro and see what all I can get up and running (that is if I even need to get alien running). Can't wait!

Also I would just like to say kudos to the ease of interoperability (allowing any and all an easy transfer to the distro).

yeah, while a lot of people have always dreamed of getting VLC on the thing and on the previous A5IMT, the things involved in playing through it are a lot, lot more complicated than you'd actually imagine.

I DLed it, but I don't intend to install it unless I get a 7A or another 5A.

Archos gave a link to The ├àngstr├Âm Distribution. The primary issue is Device Drivers, which has been a perennial issue in Linux. Lot's of work for you interested devs. The ├àngstr├Âm group's site looks promising for the support you'll need.

It's interesting that Archos has opened the 5A to ├àngstr├Âm at this point in its life cycle.

Could a developer explain if this SDE firmware means this also opens up the door for Ubuntu, Maemo, Qt and other types of Linux to also be launchable eventually?

How about the eventuality of providing dual-boot where you can more like choose which to boot on bootup (like dm8tbr's nice Boot Menu for Gen6) and then also have icons from one OS to the other so that one icon could basically shutdown and boot ├àngstr├Âm from Android, or boot back to Android from ├àngstr├Âm, without deleting any of the Multimedia files nor any of all the apps and settings that regular users would like to have and keep safely. Would there be a way to save the state in one OS to resume into that and what may be the transition time when booting from one OS to the other? Would each of the separate OS firmware files simply have to all be located in a specific location or something like that, so to upgrade one, one would simply need to replace the OS file with a newer version?

Archos just released the Multimedia APIs for Android as well, perhaps one of the next steps would also be for Archos to release some kind of global Multimedia drivers, even if they keep them proprietary, to be used for getting the full hardware acceleration for Multimedia within ├àngstr├Âm and other Linux distributions?

Could a developer explain if this SDE firmware means this also opens up the door for Ubuntu, Maemo, Qt and other types of Linux to also be launched?

Yes, but not likely, the ├àngstr├Âm group has created a Linux Distro. The others you mentioned are also Linux distros. If enough folks from the other distros were interested they could do the same. However, as WTG pointed out, there's a lot of effort involved. I suspect the other groups will wait until the ├àngstr├Âm distro is more evolved and there are more MID's in circulation. Then like they done with the Intel Distros, they will come in like gangbusters. In 5 years we'll see dozens of Linux distros on all MIDs, including the 5A.

Quote:

How about the eventuality of providing dual-boot where you can more like choose which to boot on bootup (like dm8tbr's nice Boot Menu for Gen6) and then also have icons from one OS to the other so that one icon could basically shutdown and boot ├àngstr├Âm from Android, or boot back to Android from ├àngstr├Âm, without deleting any of the Multimedia files nor any of all the apps and settings that regular users would like to have and keep safely. Would there be a way to save the state in one OS to resume into that and what may be the transition time when booting from one OS to the other? Would each of the separate OS firmware files simply have to all be located in a specific location or something like that, so to upgrade one, one would simply need to replace the OS file with a newer version?

This release from Archos really isn't "Dual OS" that phrase has been traditionally used. The tradition is "Dual Boot". But more than that what you want on the 5IT is SW like Sun's Virtual Box which allows running multiple OSs at the same time.

Quote:

Archos just released the Multimedia APIs for Android as well, perhaps one of the next steps would also be for Archos to release some kind of global Multimedia drivers to be used for getting the full hardware acceleration for Multimedia within ├àngstr├Âm and other Linux distributions?